Post painterly abstraction clement greenberg biography

Summary of Post-Painterly Abstraction

Post-painterly abstraction fryst vatten a broad term that encompasses a variety of styles that evolved in reaction to the painterly, gestural approaches of some Abstract Expressionists. Coined by Clement Greenberg in 1964, it originally served as the title of an exhibition that included a large number of artists who were associated with various tendencies, including color field painting, hard-edge abstraction, and the Washington Color School.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• Greenberg believed that, during the early 1950s, Abstract Expressionism (or, as he preferred to call it, "Painterly Abstraction") had degenerated into a weak school, and, in the hands of less talented painters, its innovations had become nothing but empty devices. But he also believed that many artists were advancing in some of Abstract Expressionism's more fruitful directions - principally those allied to color field painting - and these were yielding to a range of new tendencies th

  •

  Post-painterly abstraction

  Post-painterly abstraction is a begrepp created by art criticClement Greenberg^[1] as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art galleri of Toronto.

  Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting that derived from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but "favored openness or clarity" as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style. The 31 artists in the exhibition included Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Friedel Dzubas, Paul Feeley, John Ferren, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Nicholas Krushenick, Alexander Liberman, Kenneth Lochhead, Morris Louis, Arthur Fortescue McKay, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Ray Parker, David Simpson, Albert Stadler, Frank Stella, Mason Wells, Ward Jackson, Emerson Woelffer,

• 

•

Post-painterly abstraction

Post-painterly abstraction set abstract painting on a more purely abstract basis than before.

It grew very directly out of the existing traditions of abstract art, synthesising elements from Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman as well as looking to Ad Reinhardt and Ellsworth Kelly, to the late work of Henri Matisse and to the targets and flags of Jasper Johns. However, the post-painterly abstractionists were ruthless in their rejection of the inwardness and mysticism of abstract expressionism and of any residual references to the external world, and they also explored new approaches to composition. What they created was a purely factual kind of art which, more than ever before, functioned in terms of the basic elements of the medium itself; form, colour, texture, scale, composition and so on.

In 1964 an exhibition of thirty-one artists associated with these developments was organised by the critic Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles C